CIS Professor Receives Two Best Paper Awards at Leading HCI Conference
CIS Associate Professor Anthony Hornof will receive two Best Paper Awards at CHI 2014, the leading international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI) research, which will be held in April in Toronto, Canada. The two papers are both on the topic of computational cognitive modeling, which is the study of building and evaluating computer programs that behave in some way like people. Cognitive modeling is useful in HCI because the models can be used to predict the usability of computer interfaces early in the user-interface design process.
The first paper is entitled "Understanding multitasking through strategy exploration and individualized cognitive modeling" and is authored by Yunfeng Zhang (Prof. Hornof’s Ph.D. student) and Prof. Hornof. The second paper is entitled "Towards accurate and practical predictive models of active-vision-based visual search" and is authored by Prof. David Kieras (Prof. Hornof’s former Ph.D. advisor at the University of Michigan) and Prof. Hornof.
"No matter what new interface becomes the exciting new way to interact with computers," explains Prof. Hornof, "be it smartphones with programmable tactile surfaces, or eyeglass-based interfaces that overlay digital information onto whatever you’re looking at, or whatever, no matter what, all of these interactions will always be mediated by fundamental human perceptual, cognitive, memory, and motor capabilities and limitations. Since the dawn of HCI over thirty years ago, there has been a small group of researchers who have been developing our scientific ability to codify these fundamental human abilities in a manner that will permit us to predict how these new interactions will go. It’s really great to be part of the vanguard of this scientific advancement, but also to have the community that you are working in recognize it as well. It’s really an honor to receive these awards."